Zed Shaw interview on Rails community, enterprise, Ajax, patents, and a whole lot more
Date : 2008 01 04 Category : Tech & Development
AjaxianRob Sanheim sat down with Zed Shaw at RailsConf and had an hour long conversation with him that covered his thoughts on the Rails community, the role of the Enterprise, the state of Ajax, JRuby and Rubinius, documentation, tests, tooling, the role of patents in software, and a whole lot of opinion.
It is very interesting to listen to this after the explosion that happened when Zed lambasted the Rails community. When you listen to this interview, you see some of the seeds of the rant, but it is a lot more toned down, and there is some good stuff in there. It is easy to blog a crazy rant…. but when you are talking to someone you get a different side of the coin. This gives you that side, from a time when he wasn’t as upset as he may have been when he sat at the computer to type up his post.
Listen to the recording, or subscribe to the podcast. We will go back to more “standard” Ajax topics in the future.
Zed’s Core Quotes
On Semantic Web: Einsteins brain on a crack whores body isn’t going to happen I’m waiting for someone to blind-side the entire Web stack Some people hate me, but love Mongrel Where is the XP for managersAnd here are some of the thoughts that Zed expressed throughout the interview:
Thoughts on the Rails community, and enterprise (as big business)
Mixed feelings Mongrel was an art project Simpler software is better Enterprise software is known to be complex, and survives to make money for consulting companies Afraid of consulting companies getting behind it, as their interest is in selling 30 people vs. 3 people teamsWhat could an enterprise company sell?
Do enterprise stuff well such as Authentication Stacks: Make it simple (no ClassLoader6)JRuby
It is a huge deal The only fear is that Sun will mess it up with the JCP. The JRuby guys are rock starsRubinius
An open source project not controlled by anyone A bunch of guys who really love Ruby Massive “spec”, working with the JRuby guysState of Ajax
HTTP sucks Needs to be a reset Semantic Web: “Einsteins brain on a crack whores body isn’t going to happen” I’m waiting for someone to blind-side the entire Web stack Ajax the technology doesn’t impress me, but the new UIs that we are seeing is fantastic Usability != better looking “click here” actually does a really good job at having people click here!What is going to come out with all of the work happening on top of Mongrel?
Swiftapply Evented mongrel DrProxy OpenBSD clustering X hits per day is meaningless. What is the peak?Honest Open Source
Not all open source projects are equal Make everything open and public immediately (e.g. SVN) Corporate open source projects often lose their flavour Outside commiters are key Some people hate me, but love Mongrel Documentation is poor for Rails and Ruby, Ruby doesn’t have a culture for it Rails core does a much better job that the Ruby community in general, and this is a reason why it took off QRI command line. Way better than RI If Rails core isn’t using it, don’t use it. Add: used_byWhat tools do you use?
Vim Use a generic tool, and pimp it “I code with a thesaurus” Vim is designed to be used on phone lines, and it is very safe Good tools never cover your codeTesting
A bit of design up front Design the API Tests to measure how it is working Quality comes from the design ahead of time